This is a short animated film created by the very talented American-born-now-UK-resident writer and film maker Molly Brown called The Evil Table. I loved seeing this – it’s beautifully imagined, and rather clever, and just very funny. ‘Like’ it on Youtube in time for Hallowe’en and Molly gets her film shown at the Mayhem horror film festival in Nottingham next week – which would be great to see.
Category: films (Page 4 of 4)
In his Guardian review of Looper last Friday, Peter Bradshaw described Rian Johnson’s new film as ‘a gripping time travel sci-fi thriller’ and insisted that he left the press screening ‘dizzy with excitement.’
All as if the ideas and ambience and even the visuals of this movie hadn’t been tried and repeated and trotted out again and again for the past, what, thirty years?
I was looking forward to Looper (same way I was looking forward to Prometheus, I suppose). I came out of it just over an hour ago, fuming. Sadly, I was not dizzy with excitement, I was bored and pissed off.
I mean, seriously, could they not get any more rapid-action machine gun fire into that film?
I guess it’s me that’s the idiot here. I went into a pointless, high-concept Hollywood action thriller expecting thoughtful SF. Stupid mistake to make. No matter that Rian Johnson’s first movie, Brick, was a joy and a near-masterpiece. We’ve all seen what Hollywood money can do to talent – just go away and compare Memento with Inception. Was The Adjustment Bureau not enough to teach me a lesson? Was Source Code?
We’ve all seen Paul Kincaid’s excellent and insightful essay in the LA Review of Books, in which he argues that science fiction is ‘exhausted.’ It’s a great piece, a specific application and update of Joanna Russ’s 1971 essay ‘The Wearing Out of Genre Materials’, and every reader, writer and reviewer of SF should read and consider it. Whilst grinding my teeth in the cinema auditorium this evening, it couldn’t fail to attract my notice that Kincaid’s arguments might easily be applied to SF cinema as well as books.
It’s well known that there’s nothing truly new under the sun, that there are only seven basic story plots, or eight, or five, or whatever it is. But there are or at least there should be new approaches, original ways of seeing familiar things, an attitude that if not novel is at least personally resonant and emotionally real.
Off-the-peg films like Looper, which reiterate all the old genre stereotypes in the most middle-of-the-road way possible, are not it. I would argue that recent speculative movies such as Melancholia, Another Earth, Cafe de Flore, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World come much closer, that even when they go wrong (Cafe de Flore must have one of the dick-est protagonists of all time) they do so in the name of trying to carve out new territory. These are films that are at least prepared to risk saying something – and not necessarily at gunpoint.
All art should risk saying something – that’s what it’s for. Looper reminds me of one of those fake presents you see in department store windows around Christmas time – all that shiny paper with nothing inside. The ‘big ideas’ which are often seen by the wider public as the specific domain of SF can be problematical artistically – all too often what we end up with is generalisation, recapitulation, a big bland surface.
Perhaps what SF needs now to revitalise it is not the far-reaching, all-encompassing new idea, but for people to draw in closer to it, to narrow their focus, to work out which aspects of the fantastic speak most powerfully to them. To write about those, and to do so with courage and with honesty. Anyone who does that has originality guaranteed.
Or, to put it in language that the Jeff Daniels character in Looper might understand (did everyone keep expecting him to say ‘deal or no deal’ or was that just me?) for Chrissakes, people, show us some IMAGINATION here, will ya??
Last night we were at the excellent little Kino Digital cinema in Hawkhurst for a screening of the new British indie movie Black Pond, a film that – almost from its opening credits – instantly joined my personal pantheon of favourites. I have a deep love of the ‘strange documentary’: movies that, whether purporting to be truth or fiction, make extensive use of the techniques of life writing and news reportage to build a story. I’d count Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, James Marsh’s Wisconsin Death Trip, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation and Christopher Petit’s Content as strange documentaries. Also Henry Joost’s wonderful 2010 movie Catfish. With their magpie mentality, their excitement at the strange coincidence and that general feeling that everything in the film was discovered by miraculous chance in a cardboard box at the back of someone’s garage, films like this have unlimited appeal for writers who create their fictions in a roughly similar way.
And while loving the hand-held, cut-and-paste visuals as I did (I’m a total ‘found footage’ junkie) my chief delight in Black Pond was to be found in its words. How marvellous to have it reaffirmed that there are young film makers out there who understand, and still so early in their careers, that the crucial component of a great film, the centre without which it cannot hold, is a good script. Black Pond‘s script is inventive, daring, moving and darkly comic. It is also deeply literate and beautifully written. In the Q&A afterwards, the film’s star Chris Langham mentioned that his father (film director Michael Langham) had described the script as ‘Chekhovian’, and that seemed to me perfectly apposite. Writer-directors Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe seem to have an innate grasp of the Chekhovian grammar of understatement and natural pathos. Still both in their twenties, they also have a lived understanding of ‘the way we live now’. The combination of raw talent and learned skill they have demonstrated in the creation of this film is more than admirable, and more than just a little dumbfounding.
The fact that they were offered no commercial help or financial backing for their talent stands as both a testament to their tenacity and (yet one more) mark of shame on the monetarist political culture of our country. Tom and Will chose not to go to film school because it was ‘rather too expensive’ to do so. Instead they learned as they went along, teaching themselves the skills they needed to realise what they wanted to create. The passion that shone out of them as they described, in typically self-deprecating terms, their determination to see this project through to fruition must be an inspiration to any artist, no matter how old or how experienced they are.
Black Pond should win many awards, and I hope it does. Not least because it is a quintessentially English film, a showcase of our young talent and a slap in the face for a political establishment that consistently seeks to deny the importance of culture in the life of this nation. How fitting then that the motif that runs through this movie, that holds it thematically together in fact, should be the person and the poetry of John Clare, the quintessentially English eccentric, genius, madman, poet and political maverick. In the aptly-named character of Blake, the strange outsider who is both the cause and resolution of the crisis at the heart of the film, Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe have given us a John Clare for our time. Clare’s poem, I Am, read aloud at Blake’s illegal woodland funeral, sounds as a paean of hope and protest for artists everywhere
I Am
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest–that I loved the best–
Are strange–nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.
John Clare
Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights has at least two things in common with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris: both films are fully achieved, highly original works of art, and both are magnificent examples of what a proper film adaptation of a novel should be. An adaptation that is really little more than an illustration of the original text might be an enjoyable way of idling away a Sunday afternoon but as art it is essentially pointless. I loved John Hilcoat’s 2005 movie The Proposition, and couldn’t wait to see his take on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In the event the film came as rather a disappointment. It was just like the book, only without McCarthy’s apocalyptic prose; the pictures without the text, if you like. All it did was make me long to read the novel again.
Tarkovsky’s Solaris sheds new light on Lem’s novel precisely because it is such a highly charged, idiosyncratic, wilfully inaccurate adaptation, a variation on the original theme, Tarkovsky’s convoluted riff on Lem’s simple twelve-bar blues. (For anyone who’s interested, AT’s Solaris jockeys constantly for position with Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock as my favourite film of all time.)
Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights was written in 1846. It is more than a hundred and fifty years old. It is intensely verbal, its phrases and expressed sentiments seem to rip and tear at the conventions of the English novel as they then existed, and nothing truly comparable with it would come out of these islands until Hardy’s Jude the Obscure fifty years later. I love all the Brontes. In terms of role models they always held, and still hold, a treasured place in my heart. I loved Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Villette from the age of twelve. But much though I tried I neither liked nor understood Wuthering Heights until I was in my late twenties. I was repelled by its cruelty, its stark pessimism, what I saw as its nastiness. As my mother put it recently (she was rereading the book while visiting my brother in Sydney, Australia) no one in it is very nice. All too true. But there is no denying that Wuthering Heights could honourably be described as the first modern English novel.
Andrea Arnold has taken Emily Bronte’s scorching verbal excesses and transformed them into a film so sparse on dialogue that you could almost watch the first hour of it with the sound muted and not miss a thing. Yet somehow, magically, she has caught and distilled the essence of the novel, illuminating it with her own unique vision and reminding us, in so doing, how very contemporary it is. I have never seen the Northern moors so completely understood by the camera as in Arnold’s movie. Here we have a landscape that is bitter, chillingly resplendent in a way that reminds us as so few films do of what the land is like when there are no toilets, running water, electricity or central heating. It is beautiful for a moment, but its people live upon it as precariously as the beasts they tend and kill. The Lintons’ mansion is a pretty dolls’ house that could be swept into ruin with one slight change in circumstance of its owners; Wuthering Heights itself seems just two steps from dereliction.
There’s plenty of politics in Wuthering Heights of course – you could even call it solidly Marxist. But essentially it’s the story of a personal feud that ends in the annihilation of both parties. The final frames of Arnold’s film are, in many ways, as bleakly corrosive as anything Hilcoat showed us in The Road. And yet, as with Arnold’s two previous features Red Road and Fish Tank, I came away exhilarated. In her recent interview for The Guardian, Arnold told of how the shoot took so much out of her that at one point it reduced her to tears. It is this level of personal commitment to her material that shines through in every frame. What Arnold has given us is not a period adaptation or even a romantic drama but a testament to the survival of the artist, a homage to Emily Bronte that both reminds us of her achievement as a novelist and confirms that Arnold herself is an artist of comparable stature.
FrightFest is a force I feel powerless to resist. At some point during the long weekend of the August bank holiday I will inevitably be seen marching towards the Empire Leicester Square like an eloi obeying the summons siren of the morlocks. What is worse, now that I’m writing a monthly column for Starburst magazine I have a professional excuse to go. Fatal. For those of you who enjoy the sound of spleen being vented you’ll have to wait until the October issue of Something Rotten in the State of Denmark, where I’ll be airing my thoughts on the films I saw and the state of horror cinema generally.
Whatever the issues surrounding that, it felt wonderful to be waking up in Bloomsbury, and walking through Russell Square in the early morning I felt intoxicated by the smell of London rain, that insistent clarity after it, not just of the air itself but of one’s own visions.
The light in London after rain is the colour of chalcedony. As I left the city, trundling out of Charing Cross and on through Southwark, St John’s, Hither Green (my own beloved south eastern corner of the metropolis I saw deliciously described the other day as resembling an old dressing gown) I watched the skies darken as the train nosed gently into Sussex, the Downs with cobalt clouds heaped up behind them like darker and more distant hills, thinking why can’t someone make a film about that?
In the main, I shall remember this week not so much for the film festival as for reading Daniel Kehlmann in Bloomsbury Square.
I originally bought Kehlmann’s novel Fame for Chris, after reading a review of it here and having a persistent interest in German writers. I was right in thinking it would be his kind of thing. Now that I’ve finally caught up with it myself, I have to agree wholeheartedly that Fame is a special book by a special writer.
There’s an almost Bowlesian moment at the end of Chapter 5 of Fame when the crime writer Maria Rubinstein experiences an epiphanic realisation of the precariousness of personal identity:
For a moment she thought about her husband. Suddenly he seemed a stranger, like someone whom she’d known long ago, in another world or a past life…. With astonishing clarity she knew that such moments were rare and she must be very careful. One false move and there would be no way back, her former life would be gone, never to return.
Abroad on a book tour as a subsitute for a more famous writer, Maria has come adrift from her existence as she previously knew it. By a series of unforseen incidents and bureaucratic accidents (all too believable to anyone with any experience of travelling in the Eastern bloc before 1989) she is separated from her group, can find no one who understands her language and – worst of all – she has forgotten her phone charger. She has no way of making contact with the outside world, and so she is forced to consider how she might rebuild herself from scratch. The humour and terror of Maria’s situation is the essence of Fame, which at just 170 pages is not a long novel but is a masterpiece nonetheless. Like a cordon bleu soufflé, the lightness and delicacy of its achievement belies the dexterity, experience and artistic maturity needed to produce such an article. And Kehlmann’s flavours are refined and sublime throughout.
I should emphasise that Fame is also glorious fun to read. This is a book in which philosophy, novelistic gamesmanship and social comment keep outbidding each other like insane poker players – and yet is also so compelling as story that I simply could not leave it alone. Works that are tagged as masterpieces risk getting dragged down by the weight of their own ponderousness; Fame is effortlessly playful, a joyous and direct act of literary communication. This is a novel in which the writer colludes with the reader instead of lecturing him, letting him in on the joke as opposed to making him feel stupid.
The structure of the novel – in the original German it is subtitled A Novel in Nine Chapters – means that in narrative terms there is no 19th century continuum. Characters appear for a while, then disappear entirely for fifty pages, only to return as someone’s brother, or on a cinema poster, or as a missing persons report. None of this is remotely confusing. As a reader you race ahead, eager to discover what the hell happened to him? Sometimes Kehlmann will tell you, and sometimes he won’t. You won’t mind though, because the book’s internal logic is overriding, even when the novel has no ending in the conventional (and therefore restrictive) sense of the word.
I want to add that Fame is a novel of beauty, pathos and great compassion. For all the absurdity of their situations (of the very societal cul de sac in which we find ourselves living) Kehlmann treats all his characters with sympathy and grace. With the exception of Miguel Auristos Blanco, the uniquely self-satisfied author of a dozen or more manuals of cod Eastern wisdom and who, for reasons unknown to me, I kept imagining as a phyiscal double of Andre Rieu, these are people we feel we know and would probably like. Blanco can’t even blow his own brains out properly. but the eponymous heroine of the chapter ‘Rosalie Goes off to Die’ has a more combative approach to death. Not satisfied with the story she has been given, she takes the whole thing up with the author – and gets away with it!
For like Rosalie I cannot imagine that I am a nothing if I am not being observed by somebody else, and that my only half-real existence ends the moment that somebody takes his eyes off me – just as, now that I’m finally ending this story, Rosalie ceases to exist. From one moment to the next. Without any death throes, pain or transition. At one moment an oddly dressed girl in a state of happy confusion, now a mere undulation in the air, a sound that echoes for a few seconds, a memory that bleaches itself from my mind and yours as you read this paragraph.
What remains, if anything, is a street in the rain. Water pouring off two children’s ponchos, a dog over there lifting its leg, a yawning street sweeper, and three cars with unknown number plates rounding the corner as if they were coming from a long way away: out of another unknown reality or at least out of another story altogether.
Glorious writing. This is what the modern novel should be about.
(Quotations taken from Fame by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, Quercus 2010 9781849163767.)
'It's a bit like Mum and Dad.' Patrons discuss the latest at London's FrightFest
I went to the ICA this evening, to see Jessica Oreck’s new (I say new, but looking at iMDb I see it was made in 2009 and has only just had its UK release) documentary feature Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. The film explores the intricate and intimate relationship between the Japanese people and….. beetles! I knew I had to see this film the minute I read about it, and that if I didn’t grab the chance this weekend I would miss it. Even in our enlightened metropolis, movies about buglife aren’t likely to be granted more than a half-dozen screenings.
Even I, one of the weird handful of people who would actively go out of their way to track down stuff like this, was unprepared for the extraordinary revelations this movie had to offer. Why dream of alien planets when right here on Earth we have a city where giant scarabs are as common a household pet as the hamster or gerbil, where crickets are invited into the home to provide live music, where the dragonfly is a symbol of bravery and the emblem of the warrior class?
In Toyko, you can go to the mall and pick up a new pair of jeans and a pair of Nikes, then pop into the store next door and buy a rainbow beetle and a pack of synthesized tree sap to feed him with. The amusement arcades are packed with kids playing computer simulations of Bug Hunt and Bug Wars. Adults and children set off at weekends into those patches of forest and wild places that still remain close to Tokyo to have a picnic and to track live insects.
Families gather at dusk to watch the fireflies. Our beetle seller from the mall proudly shows us the red Ferrari he bought with his earnings.
It is not just its content that makes this film extraordinary but the directorial vision that lies behind it. Beetle Queen appears to be Jessica Oreck’s first full-length feature, yet it speaks with the kind of self assurance that if not born of long experience can only come from a genuine and passionate commitment to its subject matter. It is not a conventional documentary. It is a work of impressionist art, a montage, a collage of ideas and images that leaves you feeling you’ve been granted a privileged glimpse into one artist’s unique methodology as well as the secret mechanisms of an entire culture.
The Tokyo of this film is a world of hidden allusions and complex symbolism, an environment we in the West have come to think of as the most intensively urbanised in the world and yet whose people still maintain their connection with nature in ways that make you re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about Japan. It made me think about my other most recent literary and filmic experiences of that country – David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, Richard Lloyd Parry’s compelling book about the life and death of Lucie Blackman, People Who Eat Darkness – and what Beetle Queen had in common with all of these was the sense it carried that this is a world that we as Westerners can gaze upon but never fully enter. Unlikely though it may seem it was Noe’s film that kept coming to mind while I was watching Beetle Queen. The interplay of colour and light, the almost hallucinogenic swirl of sensory impressions, the interlocking grids of train-tracks, street intersections, city freeways that characterise both films, drawing you down into a mind-maze that both dazzles and disturbs.
In particular I was enchanted by the attitude of the children, girls and boys alike who treated their pet insects with respect and rapt wonderment, a small boy sillhouetted in the ultraviolet light of a moth trap, releasing a grey-green Lunar Moth back into the wild as a trainer might toss a racing pigeon into the sky, the three young friends who called their dung beetles ‘brothers.’ The idea that one should fear or loathe these creatures would, I suspect, be utterly alien to them.
After the film we were lucky enough to be given an impromptu and completely unadvertised talk by the Curator of Beetles at the Natural History Museum. His mini-lecture, sprinkled with phrases such as ‘the other day when we were in Peru,’ and ‘we’re in the course of naming this beetle after one of my colleagues,’ was sheer delight, all the more so given that he had brought several cases of beetles with him to illustrate it. These we were allowed to examine in close-up, and audience questions were not in short supply as a 20cm Amazonian beetle larva made its rounds among us in its jar of formaldehyde. ‘Careful with that,’ said our tame entomologist. ‘The lid’s loose.’
Which just goes to show, I suppose, that a love of beetles has very little respect for national boundaries. And according to the staff of the Natural History Museum, the number of girl coleopterists is on the rise.
I love this city.
Read an interview with Jessica Oreck here.
